[In the following review, Brownrigg asserts that Phillips exhibits her talent for presenting the dark side of life in Shelter.]

It was 1982, and the cool girl I knew had a series of books on her shelf—Of Grammatology, the Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, The Bluest Eye, and Jayne Anne Phillips's Black Tickets. These together seemed like tickets to a life as a tough and critical American reader.

When I read Black Tickets, I understood why it had made the cut. Phillips may have been counted among the ranks of the “K-Mart realists” (as Tom Wolfe dubbed that era's writers) because she wasn't doing magic realism and she wasn't trading purely on her age, though she wrote Black Tickets in her twenties. But those extraordinary short fictions—of an edged life in El Paso, of keen adolescent lust, of night roads and rituals—produced in the reader a strange hunger, a restlessness. Black Tickets shocked one out of the milky stupor that so much eighties fiction—even Raymond Carver's brilliant stories—lulled one into, numb in the knowledge that feelings were dull and life duller.

This intensity that powers all of Phillips's work immediately ignites her new novel. “Concede the heat of noon in summer camps,” urges the first line, drawing the reader into the stifling, planned universe that is Camp Shelter, a girl-guide camp, in 1963 West Virginia. Machine Dreams sprawled across the chaotic landscapes of Americans at home and at battle in the second world war and Vietnam. Shelter creates a contained and eerily regimented setting against which other dramas of American violence and loss of innocence can be played out.

By day the girls are a large, bright army, uniformed and kept busy by a severe patriotic widow who in “heritage class” drills them on the evil of communists and the value of American freedom. “Mrs T” wants to instil in the girls a terror of spies and secrecy, and of the Russians, who in their US embassy have a fiery hell-like furnace. For the protagonists of the story—sisters Lenny, 15, and Alma, 11, and their two best friends—the secrets that terrorise them are the mistakes and battles of their left-behind parents: the adultery, suicide, alcoholism and disappointments that have sunk their families into coldness and pain.

By night the girls discover the other secrets of adulthood, sex and death, in the dark, alive woods and waterways around Camp Shelter. Here they meet the boys and men who live or work near the camp—Frank, the lone teenage bugler; the strange elfin boy Buddy, who seems a benign wood-sprite; religious loner Parson, who lives out in a shack and has more than a touch of Boo Radley about him; and Carmody, Buddy's father, a vicious ex-con, who is quite simply the devil.

Phillips's happiest medium has always been darkness, but for the first time in her work she canvasses a specifically girl darkness along with the more masculine darkness of alcohol and prison and violence that she has also marked out in earlier fiction. (Her command over this territory enabled her to be one of the rare women let in to Granta's club of macho writers.) Here in these night passages Phillips's prose gasps to life: “Sometimes there was a point of heat in the back of Lenny's throat, like a hunger. The hunger waited, an old, jagged part of her. Being with Cap reminded Lenny of hunger and noise, of aching.” The sex cries that punctuate the novel like the “silent screams” of the midnight bats seem similarly like night creatures, making a sound “like something maimed and alive”.

In the scheme of this vivid, enclosed world it soon becomes clear that the good and evil will confront each other in some climactic encounter. When the scene arrives, in a pre-established biblical setting at the redemptive waters of Turtle Pond, there is a curious inertness in the meeting, even in its bloody conclusion. The inertness comes from the fact that Angel and Devil characters have arrived early. Carmody is a collection of American ills: he's drunk and mean, he abuses kids and rapes his wife. But the girls have no relation to this evil except to meet it in their night adventures, to suffer the “rite of passage” of its violent vanquishing.

The novel rattles with all its potential meanings, biblical and political; the last section is tagged “November 1963”; that date when, in the common mythology, America permanently lost its innocence. Still, the conclusion of the story is that there are secrets and there are bad men, and if your timing is right a dark angel may save you from them; for a novel of this great scope and depth, this idea somehow does not seem enough.